Thursday, 30 September 2010

The main problem with the two-axis alignment system is that it’s used for two things it isn’t great for: as a way to describe conflicts and coalitions (the “team” use of alignment) and as a way to regulate specific behaviors, rather than describe general motives (the “code” use of alignment).

Let’s look at the team use first. We all remember those stirring moments in our own AD&D campaigns where the High Elves teamed up with the ogres and demons to defend the cause of freedom against the Lawful empire of paladins, devils, goblins and dwarves ...

Uh, what? Unless you were playing in a very unusual campaign, individuals and countries usually formed alliances along the Good-Evil axis, not on the basis of Law and Chaos. Making the alignment diagram work more like this:

Here, the main fight is between Good and Evil, and Law and Chaos are just disagreements in how to pursue your side's agenda.

Now, there are other fantasy settings that squash the diagram the other way, going Moorcock rather than Manichean:

For example, the Warhammer world pushes the fight of Law against Chaos to the front. Chaos is pretty much always evil and represents the corruption and magical alteration of the very universe. The people who fight it may be kind or cruel, cooperative or selfish to various degrees, but those differences are on balance less important than saving the world from a tentacled, fiery ruin.

(And there is no Chaotic Good there because Chaos means very different things in AD&D and Warhammer; in AD&D it means you believe in loose social organization; in Warhammer it is the crawling crud from beyond the edge of the world. But that’s a topic for another time.)

So why the one big axis with a few lesser choices within each side? Quite simply, it’s how real-world multiplayer conflicts work. In a three or more player game, two players who team up or even just truce have a definite advantage, defeating in detail the other ones. Unless those team up themselves. Either way, the game quickly resolves into either a two-sided game or a two-player game. Players may waver or switch sides, but a true three-way or four-way fight is very unstable and short-lived.

This strategic wisdom, perhaps, is reflected in people’s fictional preference for stories with two sides, instead of a multitude of conflicting interests in an ever-shifting web of intrigue. I know you’re thinking now about the wildly successful World of Darkness and all its faction-rich progeny, but these are the exceptions that prove the rule. Players approach those games first as a way to choose an identity for self-expression, and the kind of conflicts that occur build themselves around that. Not to mention, you know, how all those clans line up into the Camarilla and Sabbat.

Some of the contributors to my previous post’s comments, and a number of recent original settings for “old school” gaming, look on alignment as just a way to show which "team" a character belongs to in a two-sided world struggle. Indeed, the Team Alignment approach is a very easy way to handle this thorny but traditional trait in a D&D game.

Team Alignment shows that a being has decisively chosen one of the sides in the Great Fight – or was just born that way. It shouldn't be easy to change, especially not if there are rules in the game that care about alignment. But really, those rules should mostly be there to smite the extra-special Team members who are magical, or have made themselves so, not the poor mortals who happen to swear by one name or the other.

Team Alignment doesn't reflect the motivations or enforce the behaviors of individual characters. Sure, the teams have colors and mascots that play on long-standing moral ideas. The White and Silver Unicorns meet the Red and Black Bats on the Fields of Armageddon.

So much the more interesting, then, when the self-styled paladin of Law behaves in a corrupt and selfish manner, or the Chaos-born creature shows pangs of conscience. Perhaps appearances are only skin deep, and the only divine justice for the wicked archbishop's sins awaits him in heaven? For Team Alignment, the ambiguous labels "Law" and "Chaos" fit better than "Good" and "Evil," which are full of expectations about how people on each side should act.

So what's missing from Team Alignment? For some people, nothing. For others, the very moral dimension it gleefully casts overboard. This leads us right to the next failure of alignment that AD&D walked into: the problem of regulating behavior.

Wednesday, 29 September 2010

For my 100th post please allow me to cross the streams of my professional and hobby lives.

Gygax's view of values and morality, Players' Handbook, 1978:

For most of my readership this needs no explanation (but please look here if it does.)

Now. The major model of human values in psychology research today is Shalom Schwartz's circular model, developed in the mid-1980's. The methodology is a questionnaire where people are asked to rate which principles they personally hold most and least important in life. The position of those principles (values) on the circle is derived from statistical analysis of how answers tend to be similar or different across respondents.

While people and countries differ in which values they hold important, values that are close to each other on the circle usually are ranked high or low together. Likewise, values opposite to each other tend to have a negative relationship, so that people who value one set of principles highly, usually value the opposing set of principles less.

By now there are hundreds of studies using this model (including some from my own lab) conducted across scores of different countries. In the diagram below, the smaller labels are more specific values, larger labels describe groups of values, and the 4 labels on the corners represent the largest-scale value groupings.

So on one axis are "good" people who put helpfulness, justice and equality first, versus people who put their own achievement and power first (Gygax's core definition of evil, although later editions leaned more toward a caricature of evil aligned beings as intentional sadists). The other axis separates "lawful" people who put social order and humility first, from "chaotic" people who put freedom, new experiences, and pleasure first. Hmmm.

It looks like Gygax got at least a seven-year head start on psychology here, with a model of human motivational ideals pulled out of his head that gives basically the same results as hundreds of international surveys.

So the two-axis AD&D system is a great model for capturing the main ways people and countries are different from each other in their guiding principles. Why, then, do so many old-school revivalists disdain alignment, or reduce it to a simpler system? Why does 4th edition D&D seriously simplify the alignment diagram, making lawful a subset of good and chaotic a subset of evil?

I have a few possible answers - that is, reasons the two-axis alignment system often doesn't work in games - which I'll try to describe in the next couple of posts.

Well, that was certainly one way to work D&D into the perennial theme of American literature: success and failure according to the American dream.

The Varelli kid is a dick DM, a killer DM. His campaign is brutal, his mental health questionable, and he verbally abuses his players. But his players also bring failure on themselves again and again, doomed by their greed or overconfidence or inability to cooperate or undeserved hope they'll get a break. Given the chance to play in a more placid and rewarding campaign, the narrator feels like he doesn't really fit in, and has this wistful reflection:

We fly dragons, battle giants, build castles, raise armies and families and crops. But something is missing. No goblin child will shank you for your coin pouch. You’ll never die from a bad potato.

Out of context, sure, you might take this as evidence that Lipsyte gets the appeal of high-risk, high-grit old-school gaming. But the real message is more bleak: that style of game is preparing all its players and its DM, accurately, for their predestined and self-inflicted life (or death) as losers. In fact, strike one against the story is its cliched epilogue, where "loser" translates literally to "flipping burgers" and "crazy loser" translates, a la Dark Dungeons, to "death by hanging." Strike two (working backwards) is the ham-handed way Lipsyte muffs the climax, dead baby sister and all. We'll call it a foul that HAY THE GUY WHO PLAYS AN INCOMPETENT THIEF IS IN REAL LIFE AN INCOMPETENT THIEF.

But in spite of all this, the story reaches a base on balls for its accurate portrait of a bad D&D campaign, and its matter-of-fact approach to the game as something that is not necessarily seriously screwed-up - it's just more interesting to write about a group that is.

Even more entertaining is themetafilter comments thread, where blogger Malcolm Sheppard (mobunited) weighs in on his old-school campaign, edition wars creep in like the inevitable green slime, and we're treated to an account of how ex-Crips do roleplaying games. (As it turns out, with a strong sense of teamwork learned from their gang experience.)

Sunday, 26 September 2010

I just want to give a peek at what's coming next. I have come to the conclusion that a) magic systems, especially sacred magic, imply a lot about their setting; b) I would rather present material that covers a variety of possible settings; c) there are three main ways that D&D campaigns typically treat the metaphysical world; d) each of these ways understands alignment differently; e) the understanding of alignment is crucial to the way sacred magic is handled.

So starting with a discussion of alignment, we are eventually going to end up with spellcaster classes and lists for three different template worlds: Sorcery World, Pantheon World, and Church World.

And now, the final mysteries of chromatic magic.

The Grand Mystery of the Golden School: The Angel of Resurrection

"Mercy given to those who deserve it not? That is the act of the fool, and of the Most Sublime" - so goes the saying that distinguishes Mercy from Justice. In the Golden School of healing and helping, the greatest mercy is contained in the Mystery of Resurrection - the restoration to full life and freedom of those long dead, or imprisoned on some far-off plane. The Angel, so the holy writings attest, need only hear the name and understand the identity of the person to bring him or her back in an instant.

Such power, exercised wholly on the behalf of another, nonetheless has its risks. Those who carefully read accounts of Resurrections will see hints at a toll taken upon the master who has invoked the Mystery - a diminishing of life in some way, the same risk of painful death as a woman in childbirth, a mysterious growing lesser even as the restored person strides about the world and grows greater.

There is also a more insidious shadow underlying the Great Golden Mystery. The simpler miracle of Raising the Dead merely calls back the spirit from its journey to the afterlife; the Resurrection brings the whole being, body and soul, back from its existence on another plane. It is precisely the unworthy - those condemned to the torments of Hell, or to the tedium reserved for the noncommittal - who most rejoice in their new life; but such people may not be properly grateful to their rescuer. On the other hand, those of good will are plucked from paradise, and the consequences of that shift are unpredictable. Saint Yvale used her profound understanding of this Mystery to have the Angel revive the legendary hero Ragnuoth at a time of great need for the Cities of the Wood. Ragnuoth, alas! had spent five hundred years purging his wrathful sins, and stepped forth as gently as a new-hatched chick, content only to tend the wounded and stir the gruel kettle while the Cities burned.

The Grand Mystery of the Brown School: The Genius of the Earth

The final arcanum of the Brown School is certainly not something that mankind has created, so much as approached. It is spoken of as a place, an impossible place for those who do not hold the surest command of the earth and elements - a deep cavern with no entrances, a chasm at the heart of an impassable and corrupted forest, a circle of stones in the lightless and crushing depths of the sea. Perhaps in each of these places the aspirant may find one face of the Genius of the Earth, and learn from it the mysteries of the First Things, of magic before reason or revelation.

Great indeed must be the determination of the aspirant to learn these things and not feel compelled to settle down as a hermit, Protector of some sacred part of the Earth. Indeed, some who have studied the Transcendence doubt that the Brown School's Mystery is necessary to attain it; it is a dead end, they claim, a primitive first stab at magic whose final revelation ends up chaining its master to the Earth.

What is clear is that a master of the Brown School, settled or no, possesses immense powers over the whole natural world, tending towards its preservation or restoration. The best-known legend is that of the proud city of Cithar, Cithar of the high-helmeted swordsmen, who sought to honor its founder by sculpting a nearby mountain peak into his likeness. They knew nothing of the nameless Protector who held that peak as holy. A year later, Cithar was a wooded jumble of hills and rocks, inhabited by tribes of pointy-headed monkeys hitting each other with sticks, the carving's one finished eye left on the mountain peak as a grim warning.

Saturday, 25 September 2010

Flip back herefor rationale, and move here and down for the other colors' Grand Mysteries.

The Grand Mysteries of the sacred schools of magic, White, Black, Gold and Brown, are not carved on a cobwebbed tablet in the cellars of any ruin. The quest for them must needs involve the Divine, if it exists in the world; or at the very least, must involve a contact with a Principle higher than one's own mortal self. That Divinity, that Principle, may set additional tests, quests and trials before the Mystery is revealed. Attaining a level, at least three higher than that required to cast the sixth level spells, is recommended. Beyond that, the use of each Mystery is shrouded, though their power and dangers tend to make them once-in-a-lifetime choices.

The Grand Mystery of the White School: The Angel of Justice

The Angels of sacred magic are Presences that embody a Principle, within or beyond the Divine. Any manifestation of them to the senses is both fleeting and profoundly awe-inspiring: a vast shadow, a footfall with a sound as of an army, an addictive smell of petals and incense.

The White Angel champions the principle of Justice. Its Mystery consists of a petition to right a wrong, balance the crooked, forgive a mistake. The aspirant before this Angel must be sincere, must be persuasive, and above all must be right. The powers of Justice are legendary and approach those of the fabled Great Gray Mystery, the Wish.

But the White Mystery represents a fearful departure. Until now, the White powers of the aspirant have not been used impartially. They have been used to protect self and friends, blast the evil and those considered evil. The danger of the White Mystery is this: that justice is impartial. Justice may not see things your way. "Give back the children of Vadia the Notched Rose," petitioned her former comrade, a mighty hierarch whose name is lost, "it is not just that the plague should take all three but leave the mother to grieve." And, miracle! they came to life; but as they stood restored in the graveyard, passing goblin bandits slew them, just as Vadia had slain goblin children without mercy in her days as a freebooter. The decision of the Judge is final.

The Grand Mystery of the Black School:: The Angel of Death

This is the deciding point for the practicioner of Black Magic. All the grimoires bound in human skin celebrate this achievement as the Triumph of Death, the chance to sit on a skeletal throne and rain vengeance down upon enemies heretofore distant or resistant.

A different possibility is mentioned by the few White Magic scholars who choose to mention the dire Angel of Death. Having abused, defiled, and added prematurely to the ranks of the dead many times over, the necromancer, approaching this Mystery, is given a final choice to stand with the Law of the Universe or defy it. In defiance, he is granted a grim, land-ravaging Triumph full of dancing corpses and tolling bells. But no true Angel of Death appears, just a lawless counsellor spawned of the sorcerer's own desires that will eventually either destroy him or condemn him to eternal misery as a lich.

With submission to the Law, the Angel appears in true aspect as Monarch of the Kingdom of the Dead, and grants the necromancer a painless, instant, inviolate death. In exchange, he may take with him three mortals by name, whoever or wherever they may be.

One Black tome (the fabled and possibly spurious Melanchiridion) claims it is possible to swear to both Law and Chaos, and reap eternal undeath that can end when it becomes wearisome, together with three flawless assassinations. Whether any aspirant has tried this audacious move, the Melenchiridion does not say.

Thursday, 23 September 2010

We grow near the end of our long chromatic journey. I thank you for your patience. Up here is where stuff gets ... Biblical.

So let it be written ... so let it be done!

Reincarnation - one of the most simultaneously fun and annoying spells out there. "Dude ... you're a badger." Sylvan Being Table (and guidelines for playing them!) coming with the complete spell descriptions, most likely in a pdf-tipware format.

Animal Growth is meant to combo with one of the low level animal control or summoning spells.

I could not resist the tribute to Metallica. But did resist the tribute to Vangelis.

LEVEL 4

1

Animal Growth

Brown

90’

1 day

None

Create giant from normal animals, or double hit dice of animals without giant kind, with final HD up to caster’s level

2

Mastery of Plants

Brown

90’

1 hour

None

Control up to 16 HD of plant creatures, animate a tree as treant, or animate up to 30’ square of foliage

3

Mastery of Weather

Brown

0’

1 day

None

Control weather within 1 mile (or 10 miles if weather is normal for season), change within 1 minute to storm, snow, or gale winds

4

Reincarnation

Brown

0’

None

None

Reincarnate known dead person as a random sylvan being within 7 days of death

LEVEL 5

1

Mastery of Animals

Brown

90’

1 hour

None

Call (in 1d20 rounds) and/or control up to 16 HD of animals

2

Mastery of Earth

Brown

90’

None

None

Turns one kind – earth, mud/quicksand, stone – into another, up to 30’ square and 5’ deep; or moves a like amount of earth.

3

Mastery of Water

Brown

90’

3 hours

None

Creates a passage, wave, or pillar in water, up to 5 10’ cubes per caster level

"Oh, don't go down those stairs. I haven't drawn the third level yet."

"You have to pull the lever, or there's no more adventure. Trust me."

"You can't turn back to the town. You haven't cleared enough rooms this session yet. OK, if you insist - A Mysterious Force Blocks You."

"Your Hold Person mysteriously fails - that 1 I rolled is actually a 16. The sorcerer drinks a potion, cackles 'I'll see you on Level 6', turns gaseous and disappears down the grate."

(reading mind-molesting boxed text) "Seeing the skeletal lovers' embrace, you cannot help but sigh, shed a tear, blow your nose, and think of lost loves of your past. Then the lovers stir and turn their bony skulls towards you, and you scream in bowel-loosening terror!"

See the point? The issue is not the linearity of an adventure (though branching adventures are more fun, it's true) but about DM vs. player input into the action. Within the confines of even a linear dungeon, the players control the action, tactics, and pace. It's the intruding hand of the DM, not the passive confines of dungeon walls, that grows irksome.

At the same time, I join with Jason in toasting the story DM who stays on his or her own side of the net - setting up NPCs and organizations with their own unfolding stories and agendas, but letting the PCs interact with them as they please, and enjoying the surprises that grow from the mutual interaction.

More passive dungeon DM vs. more active story DM? It's really a matter of taste, preparation, and comfort level with winging it. It's not uncommon for a DM to start a campaign as a fairly passive adventure referee, and grow step by step into an interactive story teller, as little details of the world outside Adventureland grow and build on each other.

Friday, 17 September 2010

Okay, the straight answer for me is the Trampier dungeon master screen. But I didn't use that screen. I made my own out of heavy cardboard, with a strange collage of punk rock art, stuff from Readers Digest and Boys Life, ads for D&D and Time Magazine natural disasters. Half Winston Smith (the punk collage artist), half Max Ernst. And the charts pencilled in on the inside.

Unfortunately that screen was lost to the dust of ages and is no longer available for viewing.

But there's another set of images that I associate with teenage years and the promise of mystery I sought in D&D, though they never appeared in anything by TSR. The illustrations of Sidney Sime.

There was something about those dark, detail-clotted vistas, with tiny human figures skulking and avoiding inky perils - most of the time, without much success. The Lord Dunsany stories they illustrated, when not wonder-tales of imagined orientalist gods, were seedbeds for the larcenous imaginations of Vance and Leiber. The tiny figures were men, good, bad or indifferent, who sought treasure from that which was far beyond them.

At the time, like many teens, I sought mystery, but also its illumination and rationalization - with matrices of encounter tables and saving throws. We have met the Beast and its Hit Dice are 6+6. In a way, to have Sime's illustrations in the D&D books would be to offer a promise the rules could not fulfill - a world more fit for medievalist treasure-seeking using Call of Cthulhu rules, or a set even more deadly and opaque. The clear scenarios of Sutherland and Trampier, horrors front and center, were as Apollonian a monster combat as you could hope for, and even Erol Otus' weird visions made sure to delineate every eyeball and tentacle. A Dunsany terror in D&D rules would be something like "Save each turn vs. death ray or die, otherwise lose 1 level. No stats, can't hit it, can't hurt it."

An out-of-level encounter. A Green Devil Face. No raise, no save, no hope. "It is better not."

See George P. Landow's scans here, in particular the tales of Thangobrind, Nuth and the Gibbelins.

Thursday, 16 September 2010

"A strange race of people ... the Druids ..." Although some of these spells also show up in the clerical lists. The main theme is somewhat different from the other color schools - it is the realm of what is affected, rather than functionally what is done, that unites these spells. This sets up Brown magic to be the primal, original, shamanic form of nature magic, and represent the control over natural forces that's present in many conceptions of magic - from Merlin's ravens to Elisha's bears.

As with sacred magic, the Brown spells are only a core for any possible druid, nature cleric, or hedge witch character class. Certainly there are forms of healing, protective, charm, attack, etc. magic that fit very well into those classes.

Yes, Brown's better in the outdoors ... but I've tried to include more spells of general utility and jettison some of the more notorious clunkers (um ... Shillelagh anyone?)

Monday, 13 September 2010

The upper two levels of sacred magic, before we get on to the Great Mysteries.

Some of these spells are controversial ... O Death (and her little sister Level Drain), where is thy sting? James Raggi left raise and restoration effects out of his Lamentations rules entirely, to make the scary stuff scarier. The level drain argument has been hashed over many times - in a world running rife with wights, wraiths, vampires, spectres and so on, is it really fair to let drained levels stick? I figure it is easier to include the appropriate spell and let DMs exclude it, than the other way around.

Divine Intervention, if it was just Word of Recall, would properly be Silver magic. I've added more creative ways for the Divine to get you out of trouble, closing the lions' mouths, building a cage of fire around you ... of course, the god/DM is the one who chooses.

LEVEL 5

#

Name

Color

Range

Duration

Save

1

Restoration

Gold

0’

None

None

Returns one drained level

2

Drain Life

Black

30’

None

Body (Con)

Drains one level from target

3

Life Protection

White

0’

1 day

None

Protects from black magic and level drain

4

Raise Dead

Gold

0’

None

None

Returns to life a body dead for up to 1 day/2 caster levels, with 1 hp; takes 1 hour to cast; may only cast once/caster level

5

Slay Living

Black

5’

None

Body

(Con)

Kills a living being

6

Consecrate/Desecrate

White/Black

0’

Perm.

None

Renders a 30’ square area permanently holy with bless effect for holy beings and reverse bless for unholy; Desecrate is vice versa

LEVEL 6

1

Heal

Gold

90’

None

None

Restores all hit points to living being, removing all diseases and poisons

2

Harm

Black

30’

None

Body (Con)

Removes all hit points except one from living being

3

Holy Word/Unholy Word

White/Black

90’

Special

None

Kills (2HD or less), blinds for 3 turns (6HD or less) or stuns for 3 rounds (7HD+) all hearers in range not of caster’s religion/alignment

4

Symbol

White/Black

30’

1 round

Will (Wis)

Causes incapacitating pain, sleep or charm for 2d10 turns to all who see the symbol within 90’ and do not save

5

Regeneration

Gold

0’

None

None

Regrow missing limbs/organs for living person, or restore full dead body from bones or parts

6

Divine Intervention

White

30’

None/ 1 day

None

For caster and up to 5 others, either teleports to known sacred location in 30 miles, or creates other peaceful solution to danger for 1 day

About Me

Researcher in social science and appreciator of hexy wargames, role playing games, interactive fiction, board games, and CCGs. I've learned a lot doing design and rules editing work on the side for the Legend of the Five Rings CCG. But this blog is mostly about other things.